“Treat Me Refined” 3000 block sherman avenue nw
The house at 3017 Sherman Avenue once was a boarding house for Howard University students. In 1923 a determined and talented young woman from the tiny town of Eatonville, Florida, lived here while earning an Associate’s Degree at Howard. In a short time she would win international acclaim as novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston devoured Howard’s opportunities. She performed in campus theater, joined Zeta Phi Beta sorority, and co-founded the student newspaper, which she named The Hill Top . She published her first short story in The Stylus , Howard’s literary magazine. She attended renowned poet Georgia Douglas Johnson’s literary salon, meeting the best-known black writers of the time. To support herself, Hurston cleaned houses and waited tables at the exclusive, all-white Cosmos Club. New York’s black literary leaders discovered Hurston, who soon left for Harlem. There she helped spur the New Negro Renaissance, a period of intense cultural productivity and racial uplift. She went on to study ethnography under Franz Boas at Columbia University and later collected folklore, returning occasionally to DC for professional meetings. In 1943 Howard honored her with a distinguished alumna award. At the corner of Kenyon Street and Sherman Avenue is Chavez-Bruce Preparatory Public Charter School. Built as the Blanche K. Bruce Elementary School, it opened for “colored” students in 1898. Monroe Elementary, at Georgia and Columbia, opened for white children in 1889, then switched to the “colored division” in 1931. Four decades later Bruce and Monroe merged in a new building at Georgia and Irving.
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